Notes/Restrictions

Description

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-BUENOS AIRES. This course brings together students in New York and Buenos Aires to examine how urban arts and politics intersect in the Americas. Two sections, one in each city, will meet and collaborate simultaneously via internet to address several key questions: How are art and politics understood and expressed differently and similarly in these two American metropolises and why? How do shared aesthetic features of public art reflect the global circulation of urban creative modes? What do we learn about local politics from looking at the art and writing on a city’s public spaces? Teams of students in both cities will conduct field work in selected neighborhoods to help create an archive of murals, graffiti, performances, and installations. Then, drawing from readings in history, art criticism, and urban studies, as well as from census and electoral data and using GIS technology, we will analyze how social and political processes like gentrification, inequality, and planning generate and reflect creative political expression as captured in our database, culminating in transnational, collaborative projects that explore what wisdom and truths America's streets continue to reveal, 500 years after conquest. *THIS COURSE IS TENTATIVE.